Gravitational Constantly: A Novella (7 page)

The port vernier thrusters fired to regain attitude as the shuttle moved ever so slowly over the number three block of the bridge. If the instruments didn't confirm our velocity, I would have sworn we were sitting still. While out in a maintenance shuttle, you had to be very careful of your trajectory around the gate. A bump into the wrong thing, even at this speed, could lead to a disaster and set the project back or even ruin the whole thing. At least that is what the Chief Engineering Officer had droned on about half a hundred times to the maintenance crews. This precise flight required a skilled hand, so I sat back and rubbernecked out the window at all the busy little bees that were buzzing around the bridge. The pilot sat beside me, pushing buttons, taking measurements, and typing on her computer.

The last three weeks had been hard for me, but in the end I had come to accept it, or at least not fight it any more. Cara was the shining star that Jayce had said she was. She had been recruited by Futura when she was still in school. Just as she said, she never went back to Earth after being rescued and brought to Luna as a little girl. It turns out she was adopted by a nice young couple that lived and worked on Luna. Selise and Arnold Madeos. They took good care of her and gave her as good a childhood as anyone deserves. However, things are often not what they seem to be. Mr. Madeos made a good living on Luna working for a prominent organization that had ties in nearly every aspect of the prospering colony. Mr. Madeos even rose to Vice President when he delivered his gifted daughter to the curious minds of Futura.

Despite everything, Cara said she never blamed her adopted parents. “They had a strange daughter that they didn't understand, and it seemed like the right thing to do at the time,” she had said to me. “It may have been what cut our ties in the long run, but I don't bear them any ill will. They took care of me good enough, I suppose.” After Cara's disassociation with Futura, her father lost his job and her adopted parents were sent back to Earth. When I asked how they could be forced off Luna, Cara simply said, “Futura is Luna, Andy.” Cara went to work at Cosmos, biding her time until “something of interest came my way,” she’d told me.

All of the time spent at Futura had been a waste according to her. “They're no closer to understanding why people on Luna have clairvoyance or … something like it,” she’d said to me one morning while we lay in bed.

“Maybe it's the lack of gravity,” I suggested.

“More blood flows to the brain maybe? I doubt it. We have the same amount of gravity here as on Earth, 9.8 m/s
2
, or close enough to make no difference.”

“What if gravity plays on more than just the body … what if … I don't know, maybe it constricts your—”

“Soul?” Cara interjected.

“I was going to say consciousness.”

“Ah, I forgot Andy Wright doesn't have any faith.”

“Never needed any,” I said with a smirk that made her kiss me.

She brushed her hand through my hair and let her other hand fall upon her curvy waist. “Well, you're still wrong. Like I said, we have gravity here on Luna.”

“Yeah, but you spent all that time in the escape pod floating outside of the Moon's orbit with no gravity. That has to account for something.”

Cara's smile faded and it seemed as if she were looking off to a distant place that only she could see. “Don't remind me. That's something I've tried very hard to forget.”

“Sorry,” I whispered and rolled her over on top of me and began kissing her lips above and stroking those below.

Despite what Cara thought of my hypothesis, I still held it in high regard. Jayce and I had spent considerable time talking about the subject at length as of late. There had been twenty-three test subjects, or candidates, as Futura referred to them. All of which apparently showed some level of aptitude in heightened levels of perception. Although, what determined a heightened level of perception was sometimes hard to identify. Some candidates had an uncanny memory akin to an eidetic
memory, which is more commonly, but incorrectly, referred to as a photographic memory. A few could perform complex mathematics in their heads, without use of pen, paper, or calculator. More than most had just been plagued with some sort of auditory sensory reception overload. They claimed to hear things like clocks ticking in the next room, their neighbor's heart beat as they slept next door, but only when their REM sleep was at its peak. One even said he could hear light, although they could never prove it conclusively.

Cara had been the only candidate that could produce consistent results in a battery of tests. Her ‘gift’ was the ability to predict events or results based on a small amount of context knowledge of the situation or test. In other words, with a fairly minimal margin for error, she could see the future. Although it was nothing short of impressive to see it performed, having her identify the card I was holding, or guess the number chosen at random between one and thirty, it was not the next step in human evolution that Futura was hoping to study. The cause of the ability could also not be documented or determined after lengthy observation, which no doubt ended their relationship.

Late one afternoon, I left Futura on ground shuttle to the construction site out beyond Luna. The site was to be used for the Lens project and apparently had been its purpose all along. All the talk of psychics and telepathy had me thinking about the old man at the construction site and the story of his lost companion. There was an old wisdom to him that hailed from a time passed. He had been working on Luna for years; surely he had seen or heard more than he let on.

When I arrived at the site, I wandered about the perimeter of a nearly-completed building that looked to be the mission control tower for the bridge. Crews were coming and going, moving steel girders and rebar, bags of dry concrete, and other heavy equipment about. A big man in soiled overalls stopped me near the entrance of the building. His wiry long hair was drenched with sweat and sticking to his face, which resembled a pig due to his large nostrils, big cheeks and small ears. I showed the pigman my badge from Futura and dropped Sebastian Black's name, which ended the conversation. He waved me through and I continued to look around the site.

I found the old man by the sound of his raspy voice, barking orders at a crew of haggard men that looked to be putting in some type of piping leading away from the building in giant metal conduits. I watched him in action as he finished rattling off expletives and instructions. There was something timeless about him, yet fading in this current age. His breed would always be needed, but were becoming something of relics in an almost fully-industrialized world. Earth had built up nearly every continent and tapped every resource to their fullest potential. Luna was the last bastion of hard working aspiration that had once forged the world in which we all now comfortably lived in. The last great construct.

His crew went back to work with a dull groan of an old engine, and the old man finally took notice of me. “And what in the hell do you want?” he thundered.

“I, uh, I'm sorry to intrude. I … do you remember me, sir?”

His eyes bore down on me and his squint searched my face like he was studying a map. “Oh hell, yeah I remember you, lad. What the hell you doing out here? Something I can do for Mr. Jayce?”

“Jayce? Uh, no, listen if you're busy I can come back later. This isn't a business visit.”

That seemed to tickle some forgotten bone, somewhere in the nuts and bolts of the old golem. He erupted into a laugh that bellowed from deep down. “Is that right? You just fancied a nice stroll out here in the desert? The deafening drone of construction your idea of easy-listening? Or you just want to see my pretty face?” He arched back into another head knocking laugh.

The desert he referred to was no real desert of course, although many Lunarians were referring to the construction fields as such. I laughed it off with him and tried not to sound so nervous. “No, sir. Your face gave me nightmares the last time I had the pleasure of seeing you,” I jested. “I came out here to ask you about your friend that you told me about. The one that died while working on Luna.”

The mention of his old pal hardened his smile. “Bo. What do you want to know about old Bo?”

“This may sound crazy, but … well, listen, did anyone else besides Bo ever hear anything up there? Have you ever heard anything up there?”

The old man licked his lips, crooked his head sideways, and gave me a long look. “Listen, son, I've heard tales from all sorts of people all over the world, this one and the one below. Some people will tell you they saw their grandma's ghost when they were a little boy or UFOs hovered over their house for an hour one summer night when they were fourteen. I've had men tell me they saw mermaids out on the oil rigs back on Earth. There is always somebody willing to see or hear something that isn't there; the key is that they are willing.”

“So there have been others here on Luna that have heard things?” I asked.

He ran his hand over his face and wiped his mouth. “The point is, lad—”

“You didn't answer my question. Have you heard anything up here?” I interrupted.

The old man smiled and puffed in defeat. He looked up, studying the infrastructure of steel and glass that loomed high above our heads. “You're from Earth, right?”

I nodded confirmation.

“Did you ever lie in bed at night and listen to the crickets as you drifted off to sleep?”

“Yeah, so?” I shrugged.

“So did you enjoy listening to them as you fell into peaceful sleep?”

“I suppose so, yeah. What's the point?”

“The point is, lad, the crickets weren't talking to you. They weren't there to sing you a fucking lullaby. They just were!” The old man was hot under the collar now. I had stirred something inside him that he hadn't said in a long time.

“Okay … so you're saying you have—”

“They're just crickets, lad. That's all they are.” He paused and looked up again, this time outside the feat of strength that held Luna together. “I like to hear them like everyone else, but the only difference is that I don't try to imagine what they are saying. You follow me?”

I gave a nod. “Yeah,” was all that I managed.

He looked me over again as if he were measuring me for some length of cut or concrete mixture. Then he chiseled out a tough grin and surrendered a nod of approval. “Good,” he said and gave a spit of saliva as his stamp of approval. “I think you'll be all right.” Something caught his eye and he looked toward the crew laying the pipe in the conduit. “What the hell is that?!,” he yelled at the men. “I said threaded! Threaded, not spliced damn it!” And with that he was off, pacing toward his crew and cursing with every step.

On the shuttle ride back, I tried to wrap my head around what the old man had told me. There was something simple and poignant about his words. He said everything by saying nothing at all. I only hoped it would give me the words to tell Cara how I felt. I wanted to make her understand what the old man had said. I wanted to make her understand that we weren't supposed to understand, that she wasn't supposed to find her parents and that she was chasing a dream that was just an echo on air waves that weren't made of air at all. But how do you tell a little girl that she can't have her dream? No one has that right, and certainly not a boy stuck in a dream himself.

...

The shuttle crept to a stop above the gate's top strut bars and power couplings. Cara and I sat in silence looking at the spectacle before our eyes. The airspace above Luna looked like a field full of fireflies in mid-July, with blinking shuttles drifting lazily through the night sky searching for their partners. Once in a while two shuttles would find each other in the darkness and their lights would flash and exchange a kiss. Then they would fly off to some other part of the bridge to work on something else. It was going to happen I realized.

“Pretty, isn't it?” Cara asked in a voice barely above a whisper.

I sat thinking about her question for a moment and the only response I could muster was “perfect.” The chance I'd ever see anything so spectacular in my life again was unlikely.

“I'll be out further than any human has ever been in space, Andy,” Cara said with a smile. “It should make me nervous I suppose.”

“Are you scared?”

“When I was floating in that escape pod, I was just a little girl. I was afraid of the dark, the cold, the silence, and most of all, dying.” Cara cleared her throat and her gaze drifted back inside the shuttle to me. “I'm all grown up now, Andy. I sleep with the lights off, wear pajamas to bed, and no longer hear the silence. I'm not scared.”

“They're only crickets, Cara!” I said suddenly.

Cara's mouth formed into a slender smirk, and she look amused by my outburst. “What?”

“Crickets…” I struggled to find the words “…listen, the old man told me that we aren't supposed to understand them. I know what you hear, Cara. I know that this place is special. I know there is something out there, but … but damn it!” I slammed the armrest with my fist. “There is something special in
here
too!”